Screening Log, May 2013

The Docks of New York (d. Josef von Sternberg, USA, 1928) A–
Two years before his first collaboration with Marlene Dietrich, von Sternberg was already turning studio sets (here awe-inspiringly designed by Hans Dreier) into sparkling snowglobes in which Hollywood fables play out. Here, a stalwart coal stoker on an ocean liner (George Bancroft) saves a despondent prostitute (Betty Compson) from a suicide attempt, then proceeds to marry her in a fit of drunken whimsy. Bancroft and Compson deliver a pair of silent performances for the ages, exemplifying how silent Hollywood cinema (at its finest in 1928) achieved an emotive splendor that turned seemingly generic plots into something transcendent. Arguably more powerful than many of von Sternberg's later films with Dietrich, The Docks of New York literally seems to radiate off the screen: the meticulous lighting and dazzling camerawork are a wonder to behold.

The Gang's All Here (d. Busby Berkeley, USA, 1943) B+

Berkeley (on loan to 20th Century Fox from MGM) at his most eye-poppingly bizarre: there will be elaborate musical numbers involving enormous bananas, black-draped dancers wielding neon Tron-like hula hoops, and a climax involving a plethora of dismembered heads flying at the audience in order to perform "The Polka Dot Polka." Oh, and Carmen Miranda at her most cheekily vivacious, and Benny Goodman perpetually looking like he'd rather be anywhere but on camera. It must be seen to be believed, and is never less than entertaining, but the songs themselves are pretty atrocious (hence, Benny Goodman) and the characterizations do not age well: the movie's profoundest mystery is why two women would fight over the same cardboard, casually sexist cad. (Well, aside from the fact that he's a GI – don't forget to buy your war bonds!)

Star Trek Into Darkness (d. J.J. Abrams, USA, 2013) B

Reliably satisfying genre work from Abrams, proving he's the right man to take over the reins on the (interminably) continuing Star Wars series: he's injected some postmodern self-reflexivity, opulent glitz, and shameless brawn into his Star Trek reboot. The movie often moves too quickly for its emotional interludes to truly register, but it may be futile to criticize a summer blockbuster for being too fast-paced: it's definitely wiser to be viscerally in the moment when watching Into Darkness (dwelling too long on its convoluted story will expose vortex-sized plot holes). Ultimately Abrams cannot elevate above mere craftsmanship (and, despite Benedict Cumberbatch's sinister charm as Khan, the movie's villain can't compete with the sheer terror of Eric Bana's Nero from the first film), but at least Abrams knows how to give his audience what it wants. Bonus: you get to see Peter Weller back on the big screen.

Upstream Color (d. Shane Carruth, USA, 2013) C+

If Shane Carruth's 2004 debut Primer treated the mind-boggling metaphysics of time travel as the subject for aching human drama, his newest film, Upstream Color, treats human relationships like an abstract cypher for its participants (and the audience) to unpack – which might explain why the new film is, surprisingly, much colder and emotionally distant. Despite its numerous allusions to Thoreau, its Malick-inspired whispered voiceovers, and metaphorical imagery of animals, ultimately Upstream Color comes off as lugubrious and numbingly symbolic – especially with a godlike character who records sounds from the natural world and releases them as New Age soundtracks, while apparently peddling a mind-melding drug harvested from maggot-like worms. Carruth's ideas and freewheeling plot are certainly original, but he doesn't achieve a distinct form to match his striking conceits: handheld cinematography, brief snippets of scenes edited together into a nervy patchwork, and actors bedecked in pullover sweaters intoning their lines in a self-serious mumble all start to resemble 90% of American indie movies by the end. This is one of the most acclaimed movies of the year so far, so I'm in the minority, but it's difficult to see what has wowed the majority of critics.

Possession (d. Andrzej Zulawski, France/West Germany, 1981) B+

Zulawski's mad, bitter, indescribable horror show must be seen to believed, but I'll attempt a synopsis anyway: described elsewhere as a mixture of Bergman psychodrama, Polanski surrealism, and Cronenberg body horror (with a little Fassbinder mindfuck and Godardian political subtext thrown in), Possession details the gruesome fallout of a spectacularly bad divorce in West Berlin. The woman, beset by guilt and self-loathing, apparently gives birth to two divine twins, Good and Evil – one of whom miscarries, the other of which mutates into a hideous creature who needs the flesh of men to survive. There's also a coke-addled womanizer named Henrich, several doppelgangers, and a toddler who may or may not commit suicide. Fresh off of a brutal divorce, Zulawski (not unlike Cronenberg with 1979's The Brood) lets his spurned hostility fester into the nightmarish film we see here: clearly not a sensitive depiction of womanhood or female sexuality, Possession nonetheless powerfully conveys the intense, desperate emotion of divorce, lust, parenthood, and jealousy. Unquestionably one of the most disturbing movies I've seen, although its dialogue and performances are pitched at the level of hyperbolized hysteria: like everything else in the film, its drama eschews realism in order to achieve a kind of heightened revulsion, making for an unforgettable experience.   

To the Wonder (d. Terrence Malick, USA, 2013) B–

There's much to embrace about To the Wonder: its mostly dialogue-free emphasis on impressionistic and atmospheric visuals, its analogy between the void left by both long-gone romantic partners and an absent God whose seeming non-existence forever torments us, its juxtaposition of transcendental places on earth with those that have been ruined by human meddling, and (maybe most of all) the possibility that it's really a dance movie, with its performers' languid motions coming closer to ballet than characterization. But for all of its earnestness and thought-provoking philosophy, there's no getting around the fact that the people we see (and obliquely hear) come nowhere close to relatable characters: by the halfway point (at the latest), we've become frustrated with Ben Affleck's stoic pensiveness, with Olga Kurylenko's angelic whimsicality, with Rachel McAdams' saintly suffering – or, more generally, with Malick's eternal contrast between the stern emotionlessness of men and the angelic tenderness of women. Malick's aesthetic seems, at times, to go in new directions, but more likely it's just the most uninhibited expression of his stylistic obsessions: the whispered, faux-spiritual voiceovers, waltzing camera, and cutaways to symbolic imagery come dangerously close to self-parody. If The Tree of Life approached divinity through appropriately grandiose terms (flashing back to the beginnings of time and the furthest reaches of the cosmos), To the Wonder approaches it through the mundane: bland suburban homes, Oklahoma sunsets, environments assailed by pollution and oil-drilling. Narrowing his milieu while maintaining his ambitious scope might be Malick's most brazen risk here, but it doesn't quite pay off: To the Wonder too often seems like poetic imagery in search of a legitimate conduit, populated by people who never register as legitimate human beings.

Gertrud (d. Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1964) A

Dreyer's disarmingly austere study of a woman with unattainable ideals regarding love and human existence might be the epitome of a cryptic rebus whose seemingly simple surface masks a tantalizingly puzzling inner life: Gertrud is a natural counterpart to Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), though it's much less overtly oneiric. As Gertrud holds a throng of suitors at arms' length, claiming they could never match her romantic ideals of men who give everything for a transcendent ideal of love, the actors offer blank-eyed line recitations amid minimalist compositions rife with multiple shades of gray. All of this has led to the movie's reputation as the ultimate arthouse dirge, but there's much more going on than meets the eye: for one thing, Gertrud's refusal to accept any of the men in her life for their perceived stolidity (a contrast of male impassivity and female emotionalism that reappears in Terrence Malick's films) amounts to a willful solitude, making the film not so much about the impossibility of love as about the importance of free will and living life according to one's own credo. For another, a number of bewildering aesthetic decisions – hazy overexposure in a number of scenes, a symmetrical (non-)narrative structure, voiceover narrations that shuffle between a number of characters, a dynamic use of mobile and still camerawork – suggests that the entire film might be a dream, perhaps projected by Gertrud in the waning years of her life (as the constant allusions to the past, youth, and the irretrievability of history suggest). Finally, as Jonathan Rosenbaum's excellent analysis in Sight & Sound points out, the movie might be most accurately read as a guarded autobiography by Dreyer, obliquely alluding to the biological mother he never knew and his own cruel foster mother – a life story that points towards the theme that no identity can ever be truly fathomed, that every individual necessarily lives within themselves, unable to completely connect with another soul (one of Abbas Kiarostami's favorite subtexts). So while Gertrud might not be as emotional and character-driven as its preoccupation with romance might suggest, it may be more gratifying to read the movie as a willfully misleading cypher: a personal statement whose implicit form spins its explicit subject matter in a number of fascinating directions.

If... (d. Lindsay Anderson, UK, 1968) B–

A haunting yet morbidly funny allegory for the wave of revolution and violent activism that seemed to pervade the globe in the late 1960's and early '70s, with a draconic boarding school in the English countryside acting as a microcosm for worldwide oppression and retribution. Images of Lenin, Che, and Geronimo, prominently placed in the mise-en-scene, emphasize the movie's focus on the nature of insurgency itself, though the sadistic glee with which the students rebel in the final ten minutes complicate the movie's anti-establishment agenda. This is the kind of movie that Pauline Kael, circa “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties” essay, would have hated: loose plotting, self-important formalism (with constant switches between black-and-white and color, only vaguely motivated), and a modish investigation of the nature of tyranny and rebellion. Yet unlike the other movies Kael critiqued in that essay (La Dolce Vita and La Notte most notably), If... may not have enough political insight or ingenuity to justify its confrontational air. The ultimate theme of the movie seems to be that a tyrannical status quo will breed an outraged revolutionary youth – a fairly obvious conclusion that plays much too lazily into the hands of the progressive culture that made the movie a hit. The movie's occasional dabbling in absurdism fares best.

The Great Gatsby (d. Baz Luhrmann, Australia/USA, 2013) C+

Luhrmann's up to his usual tricks here – orgiastic style, relentlessly mobile camerawork, opulent CGI, and storylines that emphasize tragic, doomed romance – so if you're looking for a subtle, understated adaptation of Fitzgerald's classic, look elsewhere. (Then again, no good adaptation has ever been made of The Great Gatsby, so you're probably better off sticking with the book.) Overlong, syrupy, and sledgehammer-obvious where Fitzgerald's prose is lithe and agile, this reworking is undoubtedly an MTV-Cliff's Notes simplification for modern audiences devoid of attention spans; that said, the movie does ably convey the book's primary underlying theme (that Daisy is Jay Gatsby's Rosebud, an emblem of unattainable happiness shrouded amongst all of his material possessions), and the eye-popping glitz can at least be defended as an implicit critique of the spectacular wealth to which Gatsby disastrously aspires. (Of course, Luhrmman's aesthetic glorifies that spectacle as much as it critiques it.) DiCaprio is reliably powerful, but Gatsby's elegiac life story, compressed as it is into a brief flashback, can't compare to the original's power. Most interesting might be the suggestion that this is really a story about New York itself: a symbol of exorbitant wealth that disguises all of the pain, backstabbing, and self-absorption that propels its richness. 

Spring Breakers (d. Harmony Korine, USA, 2013) B+

Korine's hallucinatory, gleefully deconstructive experiment in genre and pop sensationalism casts four starlets – three of them pop idols, made famous by the tween audiences of the Disney Channel and High School Musical – and proceeds to both fetishize and subvert their sexuality during a Spring Break from demented hell. Willingly toppling into an amoral void of automatic weapons, hard drugs, and murder (with the help of a cornrowed James Franco, a little too self-reflexive as a Florida rapper), the girls obliviously breeze through a candy-colored Fantasyland, only fleetingly recognizing the peril and insanity of their descent. An implicit analogy is made between sensationalized sex, glorified violence, and the reckless love of money and possession, suggesting the three as inextricable corners of an outsized capitalistic triangle. What might appear to be Korine's most mainstream venture on the surface is a sly subversion of both genre form and glitzy entertainment; it's always fascinating, though the characterizations tend to suffer in the shadow of all the postmodern absurdity. 

Behind the Candelabra (d. Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2013) B

This Liberace biography starts out close to kitsch but ends with all-out tragedy, powerfully conveying a shallow culture whose emphasis on wealth and appearance makes happiness and personal connection nearly impossible. Douglas' performance as the legendary showman excels at reveling in fantastic glamour while simultaneously suggesting the underlying loneliness and fear of aging; Damon's performance, while it falters in some of the later drug-addiction scenes, is touchingly vulnerable. At times the editing is a little scattershot, as the movie becomes more episodic as it goes on and misses a number of chances to tease out thematic and emotional connections between scenes, but the digital cinematography is gorgeous and impeccably glitzy throughout.

Re-Animator (d. Stuart Gordon, USA, 1985) B

A one-of-a-kind mix of sleazy B-grade horror, liquescent gore effects, outrageous camp, and respectful H.P. Lovecraft adaptation – and it all somehow works, flying along on its singularly weird vibe. The goofy tone is infectious and most of the cast gives surprisingly effective performances (especially Barbara Crampton). 

The Place Beyond the Pines (d. Derek Cianfrance, USA, 2013) B–

Cianfrance is obviously going for an epic of mythic, almost biblical proportions, but the results are scattershot and only occasionally powerful. The tripartite structure (in which the sins of fathers come to bear upon their sons) is intriguing, offering a narrative that's more conceptually driven than most, but audience engagement and characterizations suffer: motivations are poorly developed or inscrutable. That said, the middle portion (focusing on Cooper's character) is the most powerful and thematically complex, darkly portraying class animosity in America, and Cianfrance's control over moody visual and aural atmospherics provides some shudder-inducing moments.  

Post Tenebras Lux (d. Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2013) B+

Leaping through space and time with only loose metaphysical and thematic connections, Post Tenebras Lux is Reygadas' most non-narrative, impressionistic film yet (which is saying something). Essentially the story of Juan and his wealthy family – a product of modern Mexican urbanity, conspicuously out of place in a primal countryside – the movie includes baffling diversions such as a red-rotoscoped Devil figure, a muddy rugby match that seems to feature none of the movie's recurring characters, a visit to an orgiastic bathhouse with rooms named after Hegel and Duchamp, and a distraught character tearing off his own head in destitution. The emphasis on the sensorial nature of remembrance and the complexity of a fully-lived life recalls Proust, but the style is more reminiscent of Joyce's Ulysses: a parade of signifiers without a signified, immersed in its author's singular headspace, yet amounting to a sensorial fabric for the (often bewildered) audience. Best viewed as a sort of psychedelic quasi-autobiography, the movie succeeds in spite of its dissociative coldness: the sounds and images are so ravishing that we can still sense the heartache and passion underneath.